


Ten Thousand and One

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Golden Age, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:07:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22168357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "So, everyone knows Bunny’s badass with his boomerangs and all. And then there’s Jack with his ridiculous ability to do ninja stuff like jump around really fast and balance on his staff like some kind of monkey.So, basically, I want a ninja AU where trainee ninja!Jack goes about trying to impress senior ninja!Bunny (and previously sceptical senior ninja!Bunny is, very reluctantly, impressed). Whether Bunny’s human or not doesn’t matter to me, but I prefer him being himself. Think Kung Fu Panda maybe? I dunno, that’s up to any filler willing to take it on. Pretty please?(Incidentally, if there was to be a NSFW situation, I’ve been imagining all goddamn morning senior ninja!Bunny teaching trainee!Jack how to withstand ‘torture’ if he ever gets caught. Of course, the scene I imagined was Bunny teasing Jack with maddening foreplay...[cut for length]"So I read this prompt, and I was like, I don’t know anything about ninjas. Instead, I made this fill take place in the Golden Age. Bunny’s a master of some unnamed Golden Age martial art, which the Golden Army has partially adopted. Jack’s a kid who just got kicked out of the Golden Army. He went to seek out Bunny for more training.
Relationships: E. Aster Bunnymund/Jack Frost
Kudos: 21
Collections: JackRabbit Short Fics





	Ten Thousand and One

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 6/11/2014.
> 
> Here's the rest of the prompt: "all the while keeping in character of a bad guy trying to get information from his prisoner.)
> 
> PLEASE I NEED THIS LIKE AIR. JUST A HUMOUR ONE IS OK TOO. PRETTY PLEASE?"

Bunny looked impassively at the skinny, pale, Constellar boy sleeping on his front porch. He hadn’t so much as twitched when he had opened the door, and, overall, seemed less than promising. Bunny stepped over the boy and off his porch to go watch the sunrise by the spring in his garden. He wondered when the last time the boy was awake for a sunrise was, but otherwise put him out of his mind.  
  
When he returned from his morning meditation, the boy was still sleeping on his porch. Bunny paused to fully take stock of him. Skinny, yes, but there did seem to be some nascent muscle on his legs, at least. And many Constellans were pale, weren’t they? Perhaps this boy wasn’t as sickly as he had thought. Certainly, it would have required some strength for him to reach Bunny’s mountaintop home.   
  
Yet while the boy’s form might be explained, his clothes puzzled Bunny. He wore an exceedingly worn training uniform of the Golden Army, minus the shoes. His whiskers twitched as he thought of asking about it when the boy woke up. Even if, or maybe especially if, he had come by the uniform honestly, it wasn’t exactly a sign that intelligent conversation was on the offing.  
  
He stepped over the boy again, and this time, as he started to slide the door closed, the boy leapt up. Bunny noted that he appeared singularly light on his feet, but with no accompanying grace.   
  
“Hey! Wait!” He reached out to stop Bunny from closing the door, though a glare from Bunny stopped him before he touched the wooden frame. “Um. Hi! The name’s Jack Frost. I’m so glad to see you, ‘cause you know, I knocked on your door last night but you didn’t answer, so I thought maybe you were gone.”  
  
 _Last night?_ Bunny recalled a high wind, and what he had thought were branches or other debris hitting his door. “Do you mean to say you expected me to answer my door in the middle of the night? Even knowing who I am? Which you must, because no one makes the arduous journey here on a whim.”  
  
Jack grinned. “Well, what else have you got to do up here? Anyway, no, that’s the awesome thing! It wasn’t arduous for me to get up here at all! Watch this!” He hooked his foot around a staff he had apparently been sleeping on and passed it to his hands.  
  
With no preparation, he moved—sloppily, to Bunny’s eyes—through a form Bunny didn’t recognize. Still, with every movement, the wind rose, and soon Jack hovered in the air, needing only a few light touches to various parts of Bunny’s house to keep him aloft. “See! I flew up here! I didn’t even need to do the ten thousand steps thing! Impressive, right!”  
  
“Not as impressive as scaling the ten thousand steps even though you possess the ability to fly,” Bunny said, causing both Jack’s face and Jack himself to fall. “Why are you here?”  
  
“To…train?” Jack said hopefully.  
  
“You’re already in training.” Bunny gestured to his uniform. “The Golden Army has masters that teach the techniques of mine they have found useful.”  
  
“Uh—about that.” Jack rubbed the back of his neck. “Actually I was kicked out.”  
  
 _Of course you were._ “Then what do you need to train for? You can already fly. You care nothing for the ten thousand steps. If you plan to go rogue, you should not have come to me.”  
  
“I—no! Bun—Master! Master! I—they kicked me out for lack of discipline. But I was there because I wanted to make the galaxy safer for my family. I thought maybe…maybe you’d be willing to help me.” He grinned. “Maybe you’d even manage to make me Golden Army material.”  
  
Bunny knew he could easily refuse. Very easily. His whiskers twitched again. “It would seem I have found my next ten thousand steps,” he said.  
  
***  
  
 _“So, what’s the ten thousandth and first step?” Jack asks, one quiet morning, years later.  
  
Bunny looks at him, this fine young Constellan, still quick-laughing and playful but tempered by wisdom and knowledge of his own strength, holding a quiet within him where he knows himself. He looks at him, and sees that he has a center now that will never break. And that is good, because while Jack may know himself, he doesn’t know the world anymore. Bunny could not teach him that.  
  
And what is the ten thousandth and first step? Alas, it is not saying, Jack, let us meet as equals now, let us meet as equals as we drink starleaf tea late into the night, let us meet as equals away from the world, in one room instead of two.  
  
Bunny smiles and inclines his head to Jack. “You will know it when you come to it,” he says. “I wish you well in the Golden Army.”_


End file.
